White Paper

This report is one of a series that explore a number of the most important issues currently impacting the skills ecosystem in Canada. As technology changes the nature of work, Canadian companies must create a culture of continuous learning to ensure employees have the skills they need. Many companies have already begun, investing in upskilling and reskilling programs to address the skills gap. In this report, the author provides an overview of how companies including AT&T, Scotiabank, TD Bank, Accenture and Walmart are retraining their workforces. Further, it considers the role of government investment, public-private partnerships, and corporate social responsibility in upskilling and reskilling.

Adult learning can lead to a host of positive benefits for both the individual learner and wider society, including improved health, wellbeing and productivity. Increasing and widening access to learning is crucial to future prosperity, as well as to fairness and social inclusion within our nation. Despite this, the UK has seen a recent decline in the number of adults participating in learning and training. Moreover, persistent inequalities exist in who participates, with some groups, such as older people and those furthest from the labour market, least likely to be learning. Learning and Work Institute (L&W) was commissioned by the WEA: Adult Learning Within Reach and funded by the Further Education Trust for Leadership (FETL) to undertake a mixed-methods study to explore the motivations for, barriers to, and experiences of learning for adults at two key life transitions: returning to work after caring for children, and retirement. A focus on each of these transitions is extremely topical, given the current policy focus on how adults can be supported to upskill, retrain and progress at work throughout longer working lives. Gender inequalities1 in the workplace are also becoming more prominent, as is the role that learning can play in maintaining health and wellbeing into older age.2 This mixed-methods research involved: a rapid review of evidence on adults’ experiences of learning during the transition back to work after caring for children and through retirement; collecting and analysing data on each of these transitions from L&W’s 2018 Adult Participation in Learning Survey; qualitative interviews with learners going through each transition; and focus groups with adults in the same circumstances who had not engaged in learning for three years or more.

Stoking growth with critical skills After more than a decade of middling growth, Canada’s economy grew at an annualized rate of 3.7 percent in the first quarter of 2017, significantly outpacing the 1.2 percent of real GDP growth in the United States for the same period.1 Executives are optimistic about their business prospects, with many predicting both revenue and profit growth over 2016. However, Canadian leaders expressed deep concern about their ability to both find necessary skilled resources across labor markets and maintain the skills of current workers. To redress the skills challenge, both public and private sector ecosystem partners must work together.

In Canada and beyond, employers face challenges in recruiting and retaining staff that have the skills they need. These challenges will only increase as digitization, automation and artificial intelligence change the types of skills employers require. McKinsey estimates that 14% of the global labour force may need to change jobs as technology transforms the nature of work. To change jobs, workers will need to upskill their current skills or reskill in new fields. Yet compared to peers in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Canadian employers invest relatively little in training. On average, Canadian employers spent $889 CAD per employee on learning and development from 2016-2017. Yet some employers have begun to recognize the severity of the issue and are taking dramatic action. In a survey of executives at 1,500 large companies, two-thirds said that addressing the skills gap caused by automation and digitization was among the top 10 priorities at their company. Many companies are developing ambitious strategies to reskill and upskill their employees; for instance, Scotiabank has committed to investing $250 million over 10 years to create a highly skilled workforce, while AT&T has invested $1 billion to retrain nearly half its workforce. This report reviews the literature on employers’ efforts to upskill and reskill their employees, and examines the effectiveness and return on investment of various approaches. In addition to corporate programs, it considers three types of investment in reskilling and upskilling: government investment; public-private partnerships, such as Siemens’s partnership with academia and government; and skills training as part of corporate social responsibility and philanthropy, such as the Royal Bank of Canada’s commitment to invest $500 million to help Canadian youth prepare for the jobs of tomorrow. While there is no clear consensus on whether government or corporations should be responsible for upskilling and reskilling, many corporations are taking the lead. Case studies from companies including Amazon, TD Bank, Accenture, and Walmart demonstrate how some organizations have taken small steps by experimenting with pilot programs and new tools, while others have developed comprehensive programs to retrain large segments of their workforce. In some instances, as at Microsoft, these initiatives support both the company and its customers. While companies forge ahead with reskilling and upskilling programs, a lack of empirical data makes it difficult to rigorously determine the success and impact of these programs. Better labour market data, common definitions around skills, and more research to systematically understand the rationale behind corporate investments to reskill, including the return on investment, are needed to better understand and improve reskilling and upskilling initiatives. Further, reskilling and upskilling strategies need to build in performance measurement systems to assess what works and what does not. As digitization continues to shift the type of skills employers need, it will only become more urgent for Canadian companies to understand the impact of reskilling and upskilling programs, and to create a culture of continuous learning to ensure employees have the skills they need.

Stoking growth with critical skills After more than a decade of middling growth, Canada’s economy grew at an annualized rate of 3.7 percent in the first quarter of 2017, significantly outpacing the 1.2 percent of real GDP growth in the United States for the same period.1 Executives are optimistic about their business prospects, with many predicting both revenue and profit growth over 2016. However, Canadian leaders expressed deep concern about their ability to both find necessary skilled resources across labor markets and maintain the skills of current workers. To redress the skills challenge, both public and private sector ecosystem partners must work together.

This report uses data from the Labour Force Survey (LFS), a monthly household survey. The LFS data series on immigrants began in January 2006, when five questions were added to the questionnaire in order to identify immigrants and provide timely information on their labour market situation. These questions are: In what country was ... born? Is¦now, or has he/she ever been, a landed immigrant in Canada? In what year did ¦ first become a landed immigrant? In what month? In what country did ¦ complete his/her highest degree, certificate or diploma? The findings in this report are based on annual averages of estimates for the years 2006 to 2017.

This article's approach to specific-skill match differs from Boudarbat and Chernoff's in two major ways: it uses a different data source and it relates the match to a labour market outcome-earnings. This study is based on data from the 2006 Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID). In SLID, respondents who worked in 2006 were asked: œHow closely was this job related to your education? Similar to FOG, three types of responses were possible: closely related, somewhat related and not at all related. Making use of this job- education matching indicator and the rich earnings information in SLID, this article examines whether there is a wage differential between prime-age workers whose job is closely related to their education and those not as well matched (see Data source and definitions). The study begins with an overview of the matching indicator by various individual characteristics and presents the mean wages for individuals at each of the three levels of matching for these characteristics. The descriptive statistics indicate that a variety of characteristics affect match rates and that the wage effects vary by gender and level of education. Thus, the second section of the paper constructs models that incorporate these features to provide bounded estimates of the wage premium for a good job-education match.

This report analyzes proficiency in literacy, numeracy, and PS-TRE of recent and established immigrants in Canada compared to the Canadian-born by various sociodemographic characteristics and examines the relationships between proficiency in each of the three skill domains and some key sociodemographic and immigration-related characteristics. First, average proficiency scores and distributions of proficiency levels in literacy, numeracy, and PS-TRE of recent and established immigrants and the Canadian-born aged 16–65 are compared at the national level and for Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia, and the Prairies region where sample sizes are sufficient to allow reliable estimation.6 Second, the skills profile of immigrants by key relevant sociodemographic and immigration-related characteristics—age, gender, educational attainment, country of education, mother tongue, and official-language proficiency—are presented and compared with their Canadian-born counterparts. Finally, multivariate analysis is employed to identify key factors accounting for the skill gaps between the Canadian-born and immigrants, and among immigrants with different characteristics.